São José dos Campos, Brasil: My brush with Physics greatness

I've talked about this trip as a vacation, but officially, I was in Brazil for work. About an hour and a half from São Paulo, the city of São José dos Campos is a mid-sized industrial city. There, the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espacias (National Institute of Space Research, or INPE) was hosting a conference at which I was participating.

It was an eventful 4 days there, and I could write about any number of interesting stories: how I managed to offend a very senior scientist at the conference; our excursion to the beach at Ubatuba; a boat tour of a tropical island and swimming in the bay; the free-flowing consumption of caipirinhas, caipivodkas, and caipisakes; the requisite Brazilian all-night party with some INPE locals; subsequently missing my 7 a.m. bus to Rio because I got back to my hotel at 6 a.m., sat down, and instantly fell asleep. (I'm not accustomed to this Brazilian style of partying; miraculously, I managed to wake up at 9 a.m. and pay a small fee to catch the next bus.) All interesting stories, but I'm just going to post about one story this time: the picture below.

Me with Niesje and Eugene Parker.

This picture was taken at a churrascaria, one of those Brazilian steakhouses where they keep putting meat on your plate until you show the red stop sign. More importantly, I'm standing behind Professor Eugene Parker, with his wife, Niesje. At the left is Walter, who very generously invited me to the meeting, the Parker Workshop on Magnetic Reconnection. This whole meeting was held in honor of Professor Parker, who among other things, theoretically predicted the existence of the solar wind before it was ever observed. Then again, pretty much every scientific meeting I attend is an homage to him, whether we're talking about the Parker Spiral, Sweet-Parker reconnection, or the Parker transport equation. It's not clear what more someone in my field of Physics could do to earn the Nobel Prize, but he has won the Kyoto Prize.

I had the pleasure of sitting next to his wonderful wife Niesje during dinner. I asked her about all the attention. She told me that Gene would rather be back at Chicago teaching class or simply talking physics than receiving awards. Not that he wasn't appreciative of the honors, and even more of the teachers, colleagues, and students who collaborated with him in achieving those honors, but his greatest appreciation was for the allure and elegance of Physics itself.

In preparing this post, I came across a paper he wrote last year titled, "Reminiscing my sixty year pursuit of the physics of the Sun and the Galaxy." This is a great read, especially for those who might read this blog and who also work in space plasma physics. Frankly, I wish more scientific papers were written in this style. Mostly, he writes about the various people he has encountered over the course of his career. He also writes poetically about his motivations: "It was satisfying to me to discover how physics is made up of so many interwoven threads. Each thread is a story in itself, and yet the threads fit flawlessly together in the interweaving, as if some exceedingly clever mathematician had deliberately designed the world ahead of time."

The paper offers lots of sage advice as well. He recounts how his friend Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar reluctantly rescued his now-famous seminal paper on the solar wind from two different referees who had rejected it, and an instance when he submitted a paper on how a local galactic magnetic field could explain the observations of very thin dust striations, to which the Ap. J. editor replied, "Anyone who knows anything about astrophysics knows that magnetic fields have nothing to do with it." (Turns out "anyone who knows anything" didn't know much.) This could be a lesson in persistence to all those young scientists like myself who have had our work criticized by more senior scientists, or a lesson to scientists of all sorts in openness to a reality that just might contradict our preconceptions. He also relates some advice from his own college professor, H. P. Robertson: "When the math gets too hard, it is time to stop and think about the physics." Physicists tend to get bogged down in the math, the computer models, or even in observational data, without relating it back to the "underlying physical principles," and that's when we can get stuck in our own ideas which may or may not have anything to do with reality.

When I asked Niesje about her husband's career, she didn't mention the Kyoto Prize, his h-index, or the Maxwell Prize, but stories like these. I was grateful for the opportunity to sit by her. In the cutthroat world of academia, it has seemed at times that discovering the truth has taken a back seat to personal success (in the form of citation counts, tenure tracks, CVs, etc.). While I get why those things are important, in talking about her husband, Niesje Parker reminded me that a life dedicated to discovering the truth can also bear its own fruit.